Security Update 2018-001 High Sierra or Security Update 2018-002 High Sierra

[sdagley]

Anybody else experiencing issues with these updates? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209193 talks about Security Update 2018-001 High Sierra that dropped yesterday, but this morning Security Update 2018-002 High Sierra is showing as available when I run softwareupdate --list. More troubling, I had two users report that they turned on their Macs this morning they got a "The macOS installation couldn't be completed" message with an Installation Log window in the background. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to troubleshoot the machines, but I'm guessing Security Update 2018-001 High Sierra was responsible.

[chris_kemp]

We're starting to get reports of this too. Watching... We'll probably open an ACE as well, referencing the ones listed here.

[bpavlov]

Same issues with Security Update 2018-003 as 2018-002 had. I don't understand why computers can't even upgrade when going through the App Store. I'm not even automating anything.

On some computers, reinstalling the update fixes things. But on others I have even if I install the update it ends up in a situation where I always end up at the boot picker screen to select Macintosh HD when there is no other bootable volume and then the keyboard stops working correctly (it seems to screw up the keys with some being pressed but not entering the key pressed in the password field) so I have to restart it again and then it boots "normally".

I just can't understand how updates just worked for so long and now suddenly Apple has decided to change things up and now it doesn't work even when you don't try to automate things.

[AVmcclint]

After more failures, I tried something a little different. I've had some very limited success on machines that previously failed by using softwareupdate -i -a --restart instead of just softwareupdate -i -a and manually restarting. What's weird is that installing the update from the MAS and clicking "Restart Now" when prompted still fails every time. None of that explains why some computers absolutely under no circumstances even show the Security Update as being available. Resetting softwareupdate doesn't reveal the update that I know it needs.

[ImAMacGuy]

@AVmcclint Thank you for your updates on this, I had our monthly meeting yesterday with our ACE manager, I mentioned your results to him on the call (when we came to our afore mentioned case number's status), though full disclosure I haven't had an opportunity to try on my end, but I did at least put your results on his radar for it may not be fully resolved yet.

[AVmcclint]

Good! I'm glad people can make use of the details I share. So far adding --restart to the softwareupdate command has worked on 4 Macs.

[AVmcclint]

Oh, if you're curious about the build number for SecurityUpdate 2018-003 for High Sierra, it's 17G4015

[hkabik]

Still having issues with 003, but it seems to fail more gracefully for me than 002 did. 002's failure sent my mahcines into reboot loops, this just seems to not do anything after restart. The machine behaves as normal, the update just never installs.

[donmontalvo]

@hkabik is the computer encrypted, if so is the FileVault 2 password sync'd for the current user that is experiencing the reboot loop?

[jhuls]

I've seen what the op described recently. We don't have a good software update system in place yet so I don't know if this was occurring before 003. This has also only been noticed thus far on systems that shipped with High Sierra but we can't reliably reproduce it. In one lab of 15 systems I believe 4 have done this and another lab of 9 systems 2 did this. Those systems are identical in each lab. I've seen it with office systems as well and each time it happened right after software updates were done by the user. Our fix has been to try restarting first...this only worked with 1 system. For others we did an in place reinstall of the OS which worked every time. We hadn't considered resetting the startup disk so that will be attempted the next time we see this.

[AVmcclint]

So far I've had better luck with the updates by:
1. Manually going to System Preferences > Startup Disk and clicking on the internal drive (even though it is already highlighted and boots up properly anyway)
2. Launch Terminal and run softwareupdate -d -a and make sure it does take a few minutes to download the security update
3. After the download is complete run softwareupdate -i -a --restart and cross my fingers.

[gabester]

This is the first thread that comes up with High Sierra Security Update 2019... does the update to build 17G5019 perform any better?

My org just got a bunch of the 2018 MacBook Pros with T2 chip and are hence forced to High Sierra... after getting around the T2 restriction on external booting and figuring out how to get admin users Secure Tokens and updating other Jamf policy workflows, I'm concerned that when I update one of these Macs it will be unable to revert to its custom High Sierra build 17G2208 even via Apple's only supported method - Internet Recovery! - and I'll be forced to upgrade to Mojave. I'd rather avoid any headaches that can be avoided, but it seems like Apple's "modernization" of security updates is a user unfriendly, administration disruptive experience. Disappointing, but not surprising.

[ImAMacGuy]

@Sterritt you can go to the new os or the original OS that shipped on the machine, depending on the key combination you used to start internet recovery. If your machines you received had 10.13 on it, then even if you go to 10.14 you can go back to the original 10.13 with an internet recovery.

As a reminder, you may want to keep on old OS's, but Apple unofficially stops supporting older OS's relatively quickly (Current OS- 10.14, minus 2 - 10.13 and 10.12). With the probable release of a new OS this year, 10.12 will be dropped from support soon after, no more patches.

*Edit: spelling

[nwagner]

I'm seeing bootloops with Security Update 2019-001 (Sierra). We can't use Apple's SUS, nor do we have an internal SUS.

The update gets borked somewhere during reboot. Overwrites the the symlink /var with not much in it. The path to /private/var is still there, but trying to re-create the symlink still leads to bootloops. I tried it once as a shot in the dark.

I've run out of ideas on how to install this security update without getting bootloops, much less trying to fix the problem after it happens.

Any ideas on how to install this bugger (SecUpdate2019-001Sierra.pkg) installed without borking a tenth of our machines? I am open to any suggestion. We've got ~1k machines and about a third are in another country.

[nwagner]

nvm